Purdue News

UNDERSTANDING ANTI-AMERICAN TERRORISM

The terrorist is a study in contradictions. He seeks the birth of a better world, but in the delivery a gravedigger must wield the forceps. Frequently caricatured as psychopathic and without any genuine ideology, his motives are, in fact, decidedly political.

It does little good to call the terrorist a criminal. Although his willingness to use force against innocent civilians is abhorrent, he is unlikely to respond to the threats and sanctions designed for the control of common lawbreakers. Indeed, since his capacity for self-sacrifice may make him insensitive to conventional strategies of deterrence, intelligent counter-measures lie outside the usual realm of safeguards and reprisals.

The essential remedies for terrorism cannot be found in improved airport security, better-trained guards, attack dogs, laser firearms, electric fences or space-age protection devices. Nor can they be found in the application of conventional armed force against hostile states that may sponsor terrorism. There is no technological or military fix for the threat of terrorism. We need, instead, an informed emphasis on the root causes of terrorism against the United States.

These causes are easy to identify. In the Middle East we have meddled in the internal affairs of Iran, Lebanon and Libya, a series of ill-conceived actions that threaten to make us an enemy of all of Islam.

In Central America and southern Africa we have sustained corrupt oligarchies and repressive regimes while fostering lawless interventions (the Reagan Doctrine) against pro-Soviet States.

In Europe, ignoring the opportunities for arms control, we have proceeded with deployment of 572 cruise and Pershing II missiles in five NATO countries, a deployment that degrades nuclear deterrence while it generates renewed spasms of anti-Americanism.

Even in Haiti and the Philippines, where President Reagan takes credit for supporting the forces of "democratic revolution," it is apparent that our eleventh-hour shift in loyalties was mandated by the collapse of our longstanding policies. The true crimes of Duvalier and Marcos, according to Washington, were not ones of despotism, but of weakness. Should these dictators have been able to remain in full control, they would still be counted by the administration as bastions of the "Free World." And efforts to topple them from power would now be characterized as "terrorism."

The common thread in all of these sources of anti-U.S. terrorism is this country's obsessive enmity with the Soviet Union. Displacing every other dimension of international relations, this caricatural view of another country runs counter to our interests and our ideals. Compelled to embrace authoritarian regimes and brutal insurgencies to fulfill the desolate intuitions of geopolitics, we only ensure the growing impression of America as an affliction. Similar feelings against the United States are stirred up by distant military operations that are born from the presumed imperatives of an endless Cold War. The result is a steady increase in anti-U.S. terrorism.

It follows that to reduce the risk of terrorism against the United States, President Reagan must begin to question a fundamental precept of his political "theology"--the idea that U.S.-Soviet rivalry is inevitable and can never be tempered. Taking the "spirit of Geneva" seriously, he must learn to understand that the Gorbachev era opens up a last opportunity for our survival in the world, an opportunity for mutual accommodation that has already been acknowledged forthrightly by his Soviet counterpart.

We must not abandon our interests. Nor should we expect the Soviet Union to abandon its interests. Rather, we must understand that basing every element of our foreign policy on its probable effect on the USSR is simplistic and shortsighted. Once it is understood that U.S.-Soviet cooperation is in the security interests of both countries, and that the Soviets can share in this understanding, the way will be clear to move toward a genuinely self-serving American foreign policy. Only then would we begin to find safety from the perils of terrorism.

In The Plague, Camus tells us: "At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there's always a propensity for rhetoric...It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth--in other words, to silence." As long as the U.S. continues to stand in the ruins of thought, ruins created by its frenzied and perpetual enmity with the Soviet Union, we will be unable to avoid the more tangible ruins of terrorism.

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LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is author of 11 major books on U.S. foreign policy and world affairs. One of his books, TERRORISM AND GLOBAL SECURITY: THE NUCLEAR THREAT (Westview, 1987), explores the problem of nuclear terrorism.

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu